Out in the Midday Sun

by Margaret Shennan

  Governing this lively and talented community were long-standing Victorian standards and attitudes. Majorie Binnie had learned how greatly appearances mattered. In Malaya, European women were treated with respect by men of all races. But the concomitant was that traditional values such as propriety, modesty, purity, obedience and godliness had to be upheld in everyday behaviour. These values were put under extreme stress when a major murder case rocked the people of the Malay States and the Straits Settlements in 1911: the trial of Mrs Ethel Proudlock.17

  Certain facts seem indisputable. Mrs Proudlock was the wife of the Acting Headmaster of the Victoria Institution in Kuala Lumpur. She fitted naturally into the town’s European society, a pleasant, unassuming middle-class mother in her early twenties who sang in the choir of St Mary’s Church. Her husband, William, who had taught in Kuala Lumpur since 1902, was President of the Selangor State Band and a member of a local football team. The pair were apparently happily married, and had a three-year-old daughter. Ethel’s father, Mr Charter, was a Public Works Department official in the town. On Sunday 23 April 1911, after attending evensong, Ethel Proudlock went back home to their bungalow near the school. Her husband was dining out. She changed into a cool pastel gown to write some letters, before being interrupted by the arrival of one William Steward, a thirty-four-year-old bachelor and mining engineer with whom the Proudlocks were acquainted through their mutual membership of the Selangor Club. A short while later Ethel Proudlock killed Steward with repeated shots of a revolver. When her husband arrived home soon after with a colleague, Ethel Proudlock was dishevelled and hysterical and, though barely coherent, admitted to having shot a man. Taken into custody in Pudu Gaol, after a magistrate’s hearing in May she was in due course committed for trial on the charge of murder. ‘In the history of the Federated Malay States the case is without parallel,’ wrote the editor of the Malay Mail which reported the whole episode.18

  The British were stupefied. There were fewer than 1,500 European residents of the state of Selangor in 1911 and the spotlight was now turned upon them as a group as much as on the central figures. Proudlock was a government official, Steward, formerly a Manager of South Salak tin mine, a mining consultant. Kuala Lumpur was a conventional colonial community. Even in the 1920s it was a place synonymous with collars and ties, stiff suits, regular office hours, and the Selangor Club – known familiarly as ‘the Spotted Dog’ – which enforced traditional standards of good behaviour. In the aftermath of the case, some residents feared the consequences for their reputation and relations with the Asian races, and there was apprehension as to how the British public would react in view of the disdain in which Malaya was held at home. The Proudlock trial opened on 8 June at the Supreme Court. Trial by jury having been abolished in the Federated Malay States in 1899, the case was heard by Mr Justice Sercombe Smith, assisted by two planters serving as assessors. Ethel Proudlock pleaded ‘Not Guilty’ to the murder charge, claiming that she had acted in self-defence when Steward tried to rape her. When struggling to escape his molestations, her hand came into contact with the gun; she picked it up and shot him twice. Steward apparently made to leave the bungalow. After a brief interval there were further shots before he collapsed beyond the bungalow steps. The rickshaw man who had brought him to the house heard the noise and saw Ethel Proudlock standing over the body, gun in hand. She, on the other hand, remembered nothing at all after the initial shots. Her defence asserted that she was incapable of cold-blooded murder, that she had acted under great provocation, and that her terror and stress were exacerbated by embarrassing gynaecological problems. But the prosecution questioned the truthfulness of the defendant’s testimony, imputing that she had invited Steward to the bungalow that Sunday evening while her husband was dining elsewhere, that the two were involved in an affair, and that Mrs Proudlock was, in effect, that unmentionable Edwardian sinner, an adulteress. However, no proof of the allegation was established by the prosecutor. Conversely, it emerged that Steward had a Chinese woman living with him at his remote South Salak home. The defence, on the other hand, could not establish from the medical examinations of both parties that there was evidence of rape. On 16 June the verdict was announced. Mrs Proudlock was found guilty of murder and sentenced to death by hanging. As her distraught husband tried in vain to console her in the court, she sobbed uncontrollably until led away for transfer to the death cell, unaware that a recommendation for mercy was to be made.

  The European community was outraged by the verdict. Some had been appalled that Mrs Proudlock had been denied trial by jury, others at the imputations against European womanhood. Testimonies to her virtue were publicized; other theories about Steward’s killing circulated. In view of the imminent coronation of George V in London, appeals and petitions of Europeans, Indians and Chinese were prepared for submission to the new King and Queen. Then amid the heated public furore the case took a new twist. The London Times reported on 29 June that the prisoner ‘has written a letter in which she reiterates her innocence and states that she is unable either to bear the horror and suspense of her present position or to face another trial. She therefore withdraws the appeal against her sentence, of which she had given notice, and asks the Sultan of Selangor to have pity on her sufferings and to pardon her.’19 The reasons for this unexpected change of strategy on Mrs Proudlock’s part raised many questions, but the fact that a European woman’s fate now depended on a Malay potentate fuelled further disapproval in Britain. Rumour and innuendo began to circulate, focusing on Ethel Proudlock’s character and her putative relationship with William Steward, including the possible motive for the crime. However, the pressure for clemency was strong. The Sultan and the State Council met to consider her case on 8 July and decided to grant Mrs Proudlock a free pardon. She was immediately released from gaol and prepared to leave the country. At Penang, she and her daughter boarded the first ship home, reaching England at the end of August. Her loyal husband had to remain temporarily in Kuala Lumpur. He faced a libel case arising from police treatment of his wife, in the course of which it was revealed that he had lived with a Chinese woman before his marriage to Ethel Charter. After losing both the lawsuit and his job, he followed Ethel back to Britain in November 1911.

  The Proudlock case led to a very public scrutiny of colonial mores. Much was revealed during the trial. William Proudlock learned that there was a question mark over Ethel’s parentage. Mrs Charter was not Ethel’s mother; by implication, Mr Charter had had another liaison. Was Ethel Proudlock the innocent young English woman she appeared? Did she kill William Steward in revenge for rejecting her for a Chinese woman? Was she herself Eurasian, as has recently been suggested? As for Steward, was he, in the journalist Horace Bleackley’s words, ‘one of the innumerable satyrs with which those Colonies where the male population, is largely in excess of the female population are infested’?20 And did the Colonial Office deliberately destroy official correspondence from the High Commissioner because of the risk to racial harmony and British prestige? The bitter taste left by the case was seized on by Somerset Maugham when he visited Malaya in 1921. He was told the story by none other than Mrs Proudlock’s lawyer before using it as the basis for a famous short story, ‘The Letter’.21

  As the Proudlock case confirmed, throughout the Straits Settlements and the Malay Stares in the pioneer years the European residents were primarily youngish, able, active single British men: it was undoubtedly a male-dominated society. Those who lived in the towns – Kuala Lumpur, Ipoh, Singapore, Penang – could enjoy the collegiality of their clubs. But for those upcountry the options for leisure were very few. The civil servant Richard Winstedt, who became a distinguished expert on Malay culture, recalled a young man’s problem: ‘No home life, no women friends, no libraries, no theatres or cinemas, not always big enough community for bridge or tennis, no motor-cars, no long walks on account of that labyrinth of trackless jungle’.22 The pioneer Hugh Clifford, too, understood the trauma of isolation as a result of years administerin
g Pahang, from 1887 to 1899. ‘Educated white men have inherited an infinite capacity for feeling bored,’ he wrote feelingly; ‘and a hot climate grills boredom into irritability … It is said that “a white man, who has lived twelve consecutive months in complete isolation among the folk of an alien Asiatic race, is never the same again”.’23 Monotony and loneliness turned some men into eccentrics, others into alcoholic depressives. ‘The wear and tear of that old jungle work together with whisky in excess killed many a man in this country,’ admitted another officer who knew.24 The image of the heavy-drinking planter, conjured up with devastating effect by the pen of Somerset Maugham and others, could be applied to this isolated, disorientated minority during these years before the First World War. Despite a duty of $1.50 per gallon on spirits in the Malay States, Walker’s whisky and Bols gin were still affordable to salaried Europeans. Nothing relieved ‘the steel cap clamped round one’s temples during the day’ better than a few evening stengahs, the official Victor Purcell testified, although that did not imply he became a ‘soaker’.25

  Drink could be a short step to unsocial behaviour, which was noticeable in a mixed-sex community. Lillian Newton remembered some unpleasant situations at her mother’s boarding houses. On one occasion, at their first house on Tank Road, ‘I was very frightened of [the young male assistants]; they used to come back in the evenings from the clubs very drunk and one night … the sober men had to guard our bedroom door from one young man, very drunk and rampaging around the house.’ This was not an isolated instance. At their house in Cairnhill Road,

  One evening, one of the men found it necessary to get dead drunk and there were terrible scenes in the dining room. Edie and I sat holding hands in the bedroom while all this was going on. We were very frightened. On these occasions Mother just expelled the young man the next day, and of course it was a financial loss to her. There were many of these episodes over the years, all very horrid and distasteful. Some of them kept up a vendetta.26

  The boarders at Cairnhill Road were not the only problem. Sometimes returning from school by rickshaw Lillian encountered a man exposing himself, which terrified her so much that she could not bring herself to report it. Another day ‘we met a very drunken soldier, quite alone and on foot brandishing his bayonet’. When their neighbours left in 1912 – they were a noisy couple with a penchant for parties – ‘a mess of Dutch bachelors took over the house. They entertained prostitutes from time to time. Again no sleep, the noise was fearful and they were one of the reasons for our leaving.’27

  This incident raises the question of sexuality and the male lifestyle. Alcohol, sex and race were three issues constituting aspects of the downside of successful colonial expansion, and, as Clifford implied, it was difficult to reconcile public standards of morality based on Victorian values with human instincts and emotions. On remote estates away from the proximity of neighbours, different opportunities for solace presented themselves. Despite the deep stigma attached to homosexuality by European society, there was evidence of white tuans exploiting their coolies by imposing homosexual practices upon them, to the concern of the government agencies charged with protecting the welfare of Asian communities.28 However, the strength of public homophobia has obscured the extent of homosexuality, particularly in the early twentieth century. Drawing from life in his prize-winning novel The Soul of Malaya, Henry Fauconnier only hinted at a homosexual relationship between Rolain, a European planter, and his Malay servant. Yet he was less coy about depicting heterosexual affairs, when the wife of Rolain’s Tamil gardener, Palaniai (a ‘sweetmeat of India, a chocolate ‘wrapped in variegated paper and filled with a sugary liqueur’), became his hero’s lover.29

  The pioneer generation admitted a range of sexual relationships. In view of the length of overseas contracts, a contemporary asked, ‘was it any wonder that the white exile took to himself one of the complaisant, amusing, good-tempered and good-mannered daughters of the East?’30 Although there were public scruples about sexual relations with non-whites, single European men habitually took Asian concubines. The system was known colloquially as ‘Keeps’. Up to 1914 it was common practice for civil servants to keep Malayan mistresses – until the Secretary of State for the Colonies forbade it, forcing several officers to marry their Malay paramours, including Charlton Maxwell, brother of the Chief Secretary of the Federated Malay States. Up to this point a very high proportion of planters also had native mistresses. From his work among the planting community in Selangor, Dr Malcolm Watson put the figure as high as 90 per cent at the beginning of the twentieth century.31 It would seem that, with the exception of the Malays, Asians were for the most part tolerant of the European’s droit de seigneur, and, while individual women may have suffered, the benefit, according to the old school, was that ‘the European of those times gained a more intimate and sympathetic knowledge of those he ruled’.32

  The incidence of British men with Asian mistresses or wives emerges in anecdote. Robert Munro of Permatang Estate, Selangor, for instance, had a Tamil mistress who bore him two daughters, Maria and Eve, whom he adopted, and a posthumous son, James. Munro married his mistress shortly before he died mysteriously in 1919. In the 1920s a Johore planter, Joe Allgrove, came across another planter called Nicoll and an Australian miner called Skine who had Tamil wives of long-standing, the latter with three Eurasian daughters. At the same time the civil servant Hugh Bryson met an elderly Irish planter in the Kota Tinggi district who had married an Indian woman, and a character called Jack Le Doux was known to have a ‘Javanese-born wife, who was a bit of a tartar’.33 The tea planter Bill Fairlie heard of a man named Baker with a Tamil wife, but labelled him an oddball for riding buffalo-back, growing his hair exceptionally long, and calling his ‘three most glamorous daughters, [all] coffee-coloured … Hovis, Bermaline and Turog!’34 Bruce Lockhart, however, committed a social solecism in Negri Sembilan when in 1907 he took the beautiful Amai as his mistress, for Malay culture was disapproving; he was forced to leave Malaya in some haste. A change in attitude was in train even before the 1920s, when company managers forbade assistants to keep a woman, especially when she was on the company labour force. The view began to prevail that ‘the type of planter or tin miner who “kept” a girl’ was ‘generally of a slightly lower mental poise and strength than the rest’, as one planter put it.35

  In Singapore and Kuala Lumpur before 1914, European men had greater freedom and choice: for instance, in Singapore there were some 236 Chinese, 48 Japanese, and 10 European brothels. European men seemingly preferred their own kind, and the brothels of Malay Street and Malabar Street housed Hungarians, Poles and Russian Jewesses, a retinue recruited by professional pimps from among the poorest people of Central and Eastern Europe, who drifted East by way of Bucharest, Athens and Cairo: ‘white wrecks of European womanhood’, one man described them, ‘silent, immobile, passionless [who] trade their bodies for the silver dollars of Malaya’.36 In the absence of East European women, a young planter was told, ‘the answer was Japanese’: before 1914 ‘it was the custom for the lonely European to get in touch with the Japanese Consul in Singapore and a strict financial arrangement was made. A Japanese girl came out, lived as the man’s wife and was suitably pensioned off at the arranged time. These “pensioners” [were] the Japanese “Marys” who ran the Jap Hotels in K.L. and elsewhere …’But before that, in their role of surrogate wives, Japanese women had a reputation for ‘absolute fidelity and perfect housekeeping’.38

  These liaisons were not only an indicator of British ambivalence towards the subject of sex but also illustrated the double standards operating in Malaya in the matter of race, which extended for the most part to Eurasians as well as Asians. In the Dutch East Indies, Eurasians were treated as Europeans. In Malaya there was a meaningful distinction (except in early census returns). The British in the early twentieth century tended to be dismissive of Eurasians (which was why Ethel Proudlock’s nationality was a sensitive matter). The barrier was a subtle mix of historical, so
cial and economic factors. Eurasian descendants of past settlers were regarded as pseudo-Europeans, clinging to their European surnames and speaking English with an undesirable sing-song inflection described as ‘chi-chi’: hence the importance attached by the British to being ‘pukka’.39 In some quarters there was strong disapproval of Eurasians trying to pass as pure whites. H. N. Ridley, the pioneering scientist, depicted them as ‘weak in body, short-lived, deficient in energy and feeble in morals’.40 Malacca, in particular, symbolized to the British the heritage of two failed colonial societies. ‘Portuguese and Dutch rule have passed away, leaving as their chief monuments … a race of half breeds’ and a population who were indolent and poor and, to Isabella Bird, seemed to ‘take an endless siesta behind their closely-covered windows’.41 Finally such thinking was translated into a colour-bar policy by rulings of 1904 and 1910 debarring non-Europeans and Eurasians from administrative posts in the Civil Service, and holding them largely to inferior grades as mechanics, clerks and typists (or, in the case of a group of Scottish-Eurasians, to serving as train drivers). Efficiency was the excuse for a policy designed to protect the prestige of white men in a complex, multicultural Malaya.

  The double standards in race relations were a matter of concern to Europeans who genuinely believed in racial equality. Despite a Bishop of Singapore’s optimistic recollection ‘of the friendliness which existed among Europeans, Eurasians, Chinese and Indians’, Lillian Newton remembered differently a growing social and racial divide condoned by adult society around her.42 Having been brought up in a staunchly Anglican family to be tolerant and charitable, she made no distinction between creeds and races in her friendships. Among her best friends were the Lloyds, a Catholic family, and the Cornish Methodist family of Polglase, who were teetotallers and opposed to dancing and theatre going. Later she made several Chinese friends as a result of working at the Methodist Mission in Chinatown. She was also proud of the fact that, unlike other European families, the Newtons respected the holidays of their servants, Chinese New Year or Hari Raya. Her education at Raffles Girls’ School from 1903 to 1909 was a genuinely multi-ethnic experience. ‘I noticed that some of the children were Eurasian, Chinese or Jewish but that did not worry me. They were nice and kind, very quick and smart and I got on well with them and with the other European children.’ But she was perceptive enough to detect a gulf between her own attitudes and those of her mother’s circle. ‘These were two worlds and it was very puzzling to me … The people I met at home were all white people and those at school were all different colours … I wondered why I did not meet them at the houses we visited.’ Her bemusement was highlighted by the Sunday services at St Andrew’s Cathedral. To ventilate the interior, ‘the punkahs [fans] were pulled by Indian coolies who sat outside on the ground. It always worried me that we went into the church to pray to God but the Indian coolies, the rikisha men and our syces all stayed outside. Two worlds again, very puzzling to a little girl.’43 While Europeans mingled in public places with Asians and Eurasians, genuine socialization was eschewed.